Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on January 31, 2006 05:10 AM
Torvalds has been, and still is, an important contributor to the free software movement.
But there are other contributors who have contributed even more than he has. Nobody is irreplaceable. If he won't play nice with the community, there are plenty of people who could rewrite the bits of the kernel that Torvalds owns the copyright to. He does not own copyright to the whole of the kernel.
The situation is not even new. Something similar happened with the XFree86 implementation of the X Window system. That's why most distros now ship with X.Org instead of XFree86
It means less than you think it means.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 31, 2006 05:10 AMTorvalds has been, and still is, an important contributor to the free software movement.
But there are other contributors who have contributed even more than he has. Nobody is irreplaceable. If he won't play nice with the community, there are plenty of people who could rewrite the bits of the kernel that Torvalds owns the copyright to. He does not own copyright to the whole of the kernel.
The situation is not even new. Something similar happened with the XFree86 implementation of the X Window system. That's why most distros now ship with X.Org instead of XFree86
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